Few things are more difficult to get right than a film about a sensational subject, “inspired by true events,” that doesn’t pander to clichés. Belgian director Stephan Streker begins his honor killing drama “A Wedding” in a way that makes audiences feel that, finally, here’s a refreshingly un-stereotypical depiction of an immigrant Pakistani family in Europe. Unfortunately, the feeling doesn’t last. Streker strives hard to offer a balanced view of a traditional family in Belgium forcing their daughter into an arranged marriage, yet in the end he delivers an issue-of-the-week cautionary tale that, though well-made, hits far too many expected buttons. Thankfully the luminous presence of lead actress Lina El Arabi compensates for the disappointment. Topicality, plus awards in Angoulême and Namur, presage a strong Francophone rollout in February 2017.

Like it or not, “A Wedding” cannot be viewed in a vacuum: It’s impossible to ignore the
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Feature inspired by the true plan to marry off Louis Xv to King of Spain’s four-year-old daughter.

Films Distribution has acquired world sales on Children Royals, inspired by a plan to marry off France’s Louis Xv to the oldest daughter of the King of Spain, Maria Anna Victoria, who was four-years-old at the time.

It is the latest film by historical writer and director Marc Dugain – best known for An Ordinary Execution and The Curse of Edgar.

The feature is adapted from Chantal Thomas’s work L’échange des princesses about a plan hatched by the Regent of France and the Spanish King in 1721 to marry their heirs, 11-year-old Louis Xv and Maria Anna Victoria, the 4-year-old Spanish infanta. The aim was to secure peace between the two nations.

At the same time, the Regent of France also offered his 12-year-old daughter Mademoiselle de Montpensier’s hand to the Prince of Asturias, the 14-year-old
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In an unusual take on the World War II movie, French director Christian Carion focuses on a group of French villagers attempting to flee on the eve of the German invasion, in Come What May. Carion directed Joyeux Noel, the crowd-pleasing film about the real World War I Christmas Truce, when some soldiers on both sides called a one-day unofficial truce. Carion’s new film, in French with some German and English and with subtitles,centers on a group of people whose stories are drawn from those of real civilian refugees. It is a well-made historical film with a talented international cast, fine period detail and filmed in lovely rural locations but the story leans towards the sentimental and conventional.

Carion co-wrote the film, which opens (and closes) with photos of real French refugees and a few words about their struggles, plus a dedication to the director’s mother, who
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Kiyoshi Kurosawa. Photo courtesey of Film-in-evolution | Les Productions BalthazarGone are the glory days when Hollywood would identify and poach remarkable foreign (inevitably European) directors, enticing them with greater budgets and production capabilities. France, with its generous co-production financing, cannot compete with Hollywood of the 1930s, but half a decade ago they brought over a spate of our favorite East Asian auteurs to make several great films: Hou Hsiao-hsien (Flight of the Red Balloon), Hong Sang-soo (Night and Day) and Tsai Ming-liang (Visage). Now count Kiyoshi Kurosawa with that number. The Japanese director, best known for a cluster of haunting mysteries that coincided with the J-Horror trend and still conflated with that brief cultural moment, has made Daguerrotype, a haunted house gothic featuring French stars Tahar Rahim and Olivier Gourmet.Though often creeping towards horror—“thriller” might be more appropriate if his films didn’t move at an unsettling, dreamily
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For his first French-language film, Japanese horror auteur Kiyoshi Kurosawa journeys to the land of cinema’s birth with a tale centered around one of the earliest forms of still photography: the daguerreotype. A 19th century apparatus that captures images on a silver plate, the daguerreotype camera requires the sitter to remain absolutely motionless for a punishing span of time, and that process ends up being an unfortunate metaphor for the film itself, which demands a substantial degree of patience from its audience without fully paying it off. Heavy on moody atmospherics yet fundamentally inert, “Daguerrotype” (Le Secret de la chambre noire) never quite comes into focus.

Most famous Stateside for his seminal 2001 J-horror film, “Pulse,” Kurosawa is an expert at establishing a mood of placid unease, and that gift is on display in the opening stretches of this film. Jean (Tahar Rahim), an underemployed young Parisian, arrives at an
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DaguerrotypeDear Fern,I've heard a lot of mixed things here about Terrence Malick's Voyage of Time, so I'm very pleased at your enraptured praise. Did you know from the first moment that you liked it so much? Sometimes, in those rare special occasions, you know right off that a film is great. From the first shot of Kelly Reichardt’s Certain Women, a grainy Montana landscape grayed by winter, with hills so soft in they could be painted on, and a train arcing its way towards the camera, it is clear this film is special. Based on stories by author Maile Meloy, the film takes the unusual form of a sequence of three stories, all set in small town Montana, and each foregrounded on a woman and her conflicted yearning.Laura Dern is a lawyer whose client (Jared Harris) in a dead-end malfeasance lawsuit gets increasingly dejected and unhinged
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"The only way to keep our grip is to return to where we belong." Cohen Media recently released this French film in Us theaters (starting in NYC), titled Come What May, from director Christian Carion. Set in 1940 at the beginning of World War II, the film is about various people from small village in northern France who had to escape when the Germans invaded. It focuses primarily on two of them: Hans, seeking to recover his son who fled the village, and Percy, hoping to reach the sea, and find a boat back to England. Surprisingly, the film features an original score by Ennio Morricone, one of the few original scores he's written recently besides The Hateful Eight. The full cast includes Alice Isaaz, August Diehl, Mathilde Seigner, Olivier Gourmet and Matthew Rhys. This looks like it's a damn good WWII drama, I might have to check it out.
Here's
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Closing-credits photographs of WWII French refugees fleeing Nazi forces are the most poignant element of “Come What May,” whose fictional saga about townsfolk forced to abandon their homes, and two disparate men’s attempts to reunite with them, is a respectable but dully melodramatic affair. Director Christian Carion’s first feature since 2009’s “Farewell” is bolstered by a sweeping Ennio Morricone score, yet his narrative is too episodic, and his characters too one-dimensional, to carry the weight of grand historical tragedy, resulting in a picturesque, middle-of-the-road effort unlikely to entice anyone outside the art-house crowd.

Aside from some bumpy early edits which leave its setup a bit rushed and muddled, “Come Way May” lucidly lays out its basic premise: Having escaped their native Germany in 1939, anti-Nazi activist Hans (August Diehl) and young son Max (Joshio Marlon) take refuge in the northern French village of Pas-de-Calais, where Hans is soon arrested
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Paris-based Memento Films International (Mfi) has unveiled sales on French director Martin Provost’s upcoming comedy drama The Midwife, co-starring Catherine Deneuve [pictured], Catherine Frot and Olivier Gourmet. The double bill of two of France’s renowned actresses internationally has gone down well with buyers.

As previously announced by Screen, Ascot Elite pre-bought all rights for German-speaking territories during Cannes. Elsewhere, the film has sold to Israel (Lev Cinema), Brazil (Mares Filmes), Mexico (Cinema Nueva Era) Hong Kong (Edko), Taiwan (Swallow Wings), Japan Kino Films, as well as to Australia and New Zealand (Palace Films). Skeye have acquired airline rights.

Frot co-stars as Claire, a talented midwife facing a career crisis, who is contacted
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I have seen Kiyoshi Kurosawa‘s Daguerrotype, and the most I’m currently allowed to say is this: no, I’ve not yet learned how to blind-type that title. (It’s spelled differently from the traditionally used [and still-uncommon] term, which doesn’t help in the slightest.) If you want some quick taste of what the Japanese master has cooked up with his third feature in just one year’s time, peek at a trailer made in advance of this month’s Tiff showing — or don’t, since it probably gives away more than interested parties would care to know.

Daguerrotype is filled with incident on a scene-to-scene, sometimes moment-to-moment basis, so it only follows that any preview longer than, say, a minute will end up conceding things, even if you don’t immediately realize that things are being conceded. Nevertheless: those who want hints — including what the likes of Tahar Rahim,
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Come What May (En mai, fais ce qu’il te plait) Cohen Media Group Reviewed by: Harvey Karten, Shockya Grade: B Director: Christian Carion Written by: Christian Carion, Laure Irrmann Cast: August Diehl, Olivier Gourmet, Mathilde Seigner, Alice Isaaz, Matthew Rhys, Joshio Marlon, Thomas Schmauser, Laurent Gerra Screened at: Cohen Media, NYC, 8/29/16 Opens: September 8, 2016 If you have healthy human emotions, you’ll find it heartbreaking to note that since the opening of the civil war in Syria in 2011, 13.5 million of its citizens need humanitarian assistance, 6.6 million are displaced within their country, and 4.8 million are now living outside of their country. You would be similarly heartbroken [ Read More ]

The already-incredible line-up for the 2016 New York Film Festival just got even more promising. Ang Lee‘s Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk will hold its world premiere at the festival on October 14th, the NY Times confirmed today. The adaptation of Ben Fountain‘s Iraq War novel, with a script by Simon Beaufoy (Slumdog Millionaire), follows a teenage soldier who survives a battle in Iraq and then is brought home for a victory lap before returning.

Lee has shot the film at 120 frames per second in 4K and native 3D, giving it unprecedented clarity for a feature film, which also means the screening will be held in a relatively small 300-seat theater at AMC Lincoln Square, one of the few with the technology to present it that way. While it’s expected that this Lincoln Square theater will play the film when it arrives in theaters, it may be
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Toronto International Film Festival continues to add to its already eclectic slate by announcing their Platform line-up today. Beginning last year as a special program to highlight auteur-driven features from around the world, this year’s line-up looks remarkably strong, opening with Bertrand Bonello‘s Paris-set terrorism drama Nocturama.

Kiyoshi Kurosawa is on quite the roll: nine months after Journey to the Shore and four since Creepy premiered, both of which we highly recommend, we have a new teaser for his French-language debut, The Woman in the Silver Plate, which collects some of the country’s best actors — Tahar Rahim, Mathieu Amalric, Olivier Gourmet (Belgian, albeit French-speaking), and Constance Rousseau (Simon Killer) — for (surprise!) an eerie tale involving the mystical and unknown.

Aside from a likely festival appearance, the thing’s still some ways off — a French theatrical release won’t be underway until late November, and there’s no U.S. distributor yet announced — but at least we have a teaser. However brief, it’s a cinematographic and formal beauty, perhaps early evidence that Kurosawa’s transition to a new language and continent hasn’t dulled the man’s intoxicating sense for capturing images.

The Dardennes, the Belgian brothers and directors, have finally gone full genre. Well, in so far as the two-time Palme d'Or winners, famous for their scrupulously social realist dramas made after a less-known career in documentaries, desire to make torque their liberal politics, masterfully unshowy style, and often stunning denouements of spiritual redemption into a film that follows mainstream conventions. L’enfant (2005) began this subtle evolution, telling the story of a father looking for his child as if it were a thriller. The Kid with the Bike (2011), somewhat controversially for these filmmakers who famously work with non-professionals or unknowns, added a French star to the cast (Cécile de France), while their last movie doubled down on that artifice by not only putting Marion Cotillard in the lead of Two Days, One Night (2014), but wrote that film in such a structured, fatalist manner ask to nearly resemble a film by Fritz Lang.
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In Jean Pierre and Luc Dardenne’s very best films, you know exactly what you’re getting — until the quiet dramatic pivot that gently ensures you don’t. In “The Unknown Girl,” only the first half of that assessment is true, though what we get is largely exemplary: a simple but urgent objective threaded with needling observations of social imbalance, a camera that gazes with steady intent into story-bearing faces, and an especially riveting example of one in their gifted, toughly tranquil leading lady Adèle Haenel. What’s missing, however, from this stoically humane procedural tale of a guilt-racked Gp investigating a nameless passer-by’s passing, is any great sense of narrative or emotional surprise: It’s a film that skilfully makes us feel precisely what we expect to feel from moment to moment, up to and including the long-forestalled waterworks. Though it will receive the broad distribution practically guaranteed
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Jacques-Henri Bronckart of Belgian outfit Versus has revealed details of the production, which is due to shoot in the summer and will be handled internationally by TF1.

The film centres on a small-time crook who is framed for murder and has to go on the run to prove his innocence.

Troukens was an armed robber, targeting security vans in the 1990s. He was convicted and sentenced to 28 years in prison while on the run and was finally caught in 2004.

In jail, he studied philosophy and turned his life around prior to being released conditionally for good behaviour in 2010. Since his release, he has gone on to become a well-known TV personality, with his own show, Un Crime Parfait.

The latest from Mungiu, whose “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days” won Cannes’ 2007 Palme d’Or, the consecration of the so-called Romanian New Wave, “Graduation” is a father-daughter ethical drama turning on a small-town doctor’s ambitions for his clever daughter to win a scholarship outside Romania.

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